Sunday, May 23, 2010

Clay IV.1

THE CLAY TESTAMENT: VOLUME IV

Knowledge: what does the word properly mean? There are ways of understanding the word that abuse it terribly, that force the word's and the world's fall further than one could previously have imagined. And these ways are now in the mainstream--they have long been so.

Many will immediately resist this writing because of what they take to be "knowledge." They will insist that any writing about our relations with God must be a kind of hocus pocus about which we should all know better. "God is dead," they echo. "We live in the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages."

I do not agree that our century knows better. I would insist we know worse. As 20th century men and women, we do know "more," in a way, but to know more, for us, is to know worse. The manner in which we know is not better. It is, for many, no longer knowledge.